The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective (second edition; London: Thomas Bosworth, 1852), by Thomas Beames

 

There is a period in all languages, when words pass from the mint in which they are coined, their questionable origin is forgotten, and they are used among the current money of the realm of thought. We believe that such is the case with the word Rookery. The uninitiated may ask its meaning, and the philologist wish to know the stages by which it arrived at its present acceptation. It would be wrong to call the dwellings of the working classes generally Rookeries: in country villages they hardly lie close enough for that; they are not high enough - sufficiently crowded; there is not the same economy of space which The Legitimate Rookery demands.
  

[-2-] Doubtless there is some analogy between these pauper colonies and the nests of the birds from whom they take their name; the houses for the most part high and narrow, the largest possible number crowded together in a given space, - common necessity their bond of union: though the occupation of the different tenants varies, yet they belong to the same section of the social body, having all descended to the lowest scale which is compatible with human life. Other birds are broken up into separate families - occupy separate nests; rooks seem to know no such distinction. So it is with the class whose dwellings we are to describe. We must speak of the dwellings of the poor in crowded cities, where large masses of men are brought together; where, by the unwritten laws of competition, rents rise and room is economised in proportion; where, because there is no restraint to check the progress of avarice, no statute to make men do their duty, they turn to profit the necessities of their fellow-creatures, and riot on the unhallowed gains which injustice has amassed at the expense of the poor.
    We must speak of human masses pent up, crowded, crammed into courts and allies; here, as by a fatal attraction, opposite houses grow together at the top, seem to nod one against one another, conspiring to shut out the little air which would pierce through for the relief of those beneath. We must speak of men and women sleeping in the same apartment, whom, in some cases, not even the tie of relationship unites; of a married couple with their offspring, who have already come to the [-3-] age of maturity, with a common dormitory; and we ask, if a malignant spirit wished to demoralise the working classes of the country, could he find a plan more congenial to his wishes? We must speak of stories piled on stories in the older part of our towns; not each floor, but each room tenanted by a family; in some cases the dormitory of several occupants, thrown together without distinction of sex or age in the chance scramble for the night's lodging, each swelling the gains of some middleman, whose heart is seared by the recollection of his own poverty, and who learns to grind as he was once ground by others…..

…… Are not these colonies Rookeries, if the description given by the naturalist be correct? "A Rookery, a village in the air peopled with numerous inhabitants: it is the nature of birds to associate together, and they build in numbers in the same or adjoining trees." Rookeries they are, if rooks [-4-] build high and lie thick together, young and old in one nest. Colonies are wedged up, not so much because of connection between families as by common wants and a common nature, and with the fierce discord and occasional combats of the inhabitants. The tenants of these Rookeries, like the birds from whom they take their names, have much in common-want, with its offspring, recklessness; they the pariahs, so to speak, of the body social, a distinct caste, yet not bound together otherwise than by common wants-with their jealousies, discords, and antipathies; as if it were not too true of them, as of others, that a man's foes may be they of his own household.

A change has come over us. The rich have room, have air, have houses endeared to them, by every comfort civilisation can minister ; the poor still remain sad heralds of the past, alone bearing the iniquities, and inheriting the curse of their fathers. Worse paid, do they breathe a purer air? Worse fed, are they better housed than their ancestors ? Regent Street attracts the eye! Rookeries still remain! Westminster, at once the seat of a palace and a plague spot; senators declaim, where sewers poison; theology holds her councils, where thieves learn their trade; and Europe's grandest hall is flanked by England's foulest grave-yard.

 

    Various causes combined to produce them. Many, from the first, were intended for the occupation of the poor. In the parish of St. Pancras, you have streets of the class Rookery, which cannot be fifty years old; small houses are now building which will soon become Rookeries. Agar Town, in that immense parish, contains a squalid population, originally a band of settlers, who seem, as they would say in America, to have squatted there, and now it is almost impossible to remove them. In other districts, rows of small houses are constantly erected; the ground around them is not drained, and they are as so many depots for the investment of money by rapacious speculators. These houses are badly built, mere lath and plaster; built, we should think, by contract, solely as a profitable investment, with an evident desire to evade the provisions which the Legislature, at last, has been forced, from a sense of decency, to enjoin. In this attempt to neutralise Acts of Parliament, contractors have been eminently successful, owing to the want of a public prosecutor, whose business it is, as in France and other countries, to uphold the law. The recklessness of [-16-] poverty, the greediness of avarice combined,-what pledge have you that such dwellings shall serve more than the temporary purposes for which they were erected? No real reform will take place till the size, materials employed, drainage, &c. are fixed by Act of Parliament; dilapidated houses, insecure dwellings, all, in a word, which do not answer the purpose proposed, and will not bear the strictest examination, should be condemned by a committee appointed for the purpose. A wholesome check would soon be imposed upon the heartlessness of capitalists, and poverty protected in spite of self.

A large class of the genus Rookery, are very ancient houses, deserted by those to whose ancestors they once belonged. The tide of fashion - the rage for novelty - the changes of the times, have also changed the character of the population who now tenant these buildings. In the dingiest streets of the Metropolis are found houses, the rooms of which are lofty, the walls panelled, the ceilings beautifully ornamented, (although the gilding which encrusted the ornaments is worn off,) the chimney-pieces models for the sculptor. In many rooms there still remain the grotesque carvings for which a former age was so celebrated. You have the heavy balustrades, the wide staircase, with its massive rails, or, as we now call them, bannisters; you have the strong doorway, with its carvings, the large unwieldy door, and those well-known features of the olden time, in keeping with the quaint and dust-stained engravings which seem to have descended as heirlooms from one poor family to another. [-17-] The names of the courts remind you of decayed glory,- Villiers, Dorset, Buckingham, Norfolk, telling of the stately edifices which once stood where you now breathe the impure atmosphere of a thickly-peopled court. A street, now remarkable only for its narrowness and dirt, is called Garden, because once there was a garden there some term of chivalry distinguishes another ; some article of dress, now in disuse, a third; some alley, without a pump, bears the pompous name of Fountain Court. The houses themselves are in keeping externally, with what we have described of the interior; the dark redbrick, the pillars, with their capitals and quaint figures, speaking of art called forth by wealth, and taxed to produce novelty, to stamp on the buildings in which he lived, the rank of the owner.
    In other parts of
London, groups of small houses, with their background of courts and alleys, have been erected upon the site of large gardens, which formerly were the pleasure grounds of stately mansions. Two hundred years since, one side of the Strand consisted of the houses of the nobility; of these mansions, Northumberland House is the only remnant, the grounds belonging to which extended to the river. The famous Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the courtier in the times of Charles II., pulled down the magnificent house in which he lived; the site of it, together with the gardens, is occupied by streets which bear his name and title some of these are rapidly degenerating, and will become Rookeries, if no change take place in the social con-[-18-]dition of the poor; the beautiful water gate seen from the river, was the entrance to the grounds.

    Such are the general features of London Rookeries…. The most aristocratic parishes, as they are termed, have a background of wretchedness, and are too often so many screens for misery which would shock the mind and make men avert their gaze, could they indeed see them as they really are.

…. Tan-pits, glue-yards,- the head quarters of some odoriferous traffic,-subtract about seventy per cent, not only from the comforts but the necessaries of life. If air and water be essential for beings constituted as we are, Rookeries in such localities become dens of pestilence, and the full pressure of poverty is here exposed, by the loathsome dwellings to which it drives its victims. Men must be sunk indeed - desperate, reckless, past power of redemption, we had well nigh said-who could tolerate such a neighbourhood as the scene where they are to know the blessed influence of wedded love, and which is to be pictured in their children's memories as the place where first they saw the light. Suppose a man to marry, with some of the usual aspirations of his kind,-with some love for, and interest in, the being to whom he is united; allow him only the smallest particle of that romance which ought to gild unions such as these, how soon must he lose every finer feeling, how rapidly become demoralized by the loathsome attributes of a plague spot! Moralists have ever ranked among the great panaceas of our kind the hallowed influence of marriage, - how it destroys selfishness; what a stake it gives a man in the welfare of his country; how it opens the heart to the wants and feelings of others; what an object to live for; what benefit the country reaps from well-trained families; with what cheerfulness the man who is happily married goes to his daily work; what an aid to the sway of pure and sober religion these home [-71-] sympathies are! How does the romance of affection give a delicacy to the thoughts and refinement to the taste? All is checked, or rather distorted in neighbourhoods such as these; we blot out from the catalogue of God's gifts to men the holiest, the most precious of earthly blessings. The body soon becomes enfeebled by inhaling a fetid atmosphere, disease is generated, seizes hold upon some flaw in a weak constitution, makes one for itself in the stronger frame, and the mind sympathizes, is clouded, is driven to seek questionable relaxations, to purchase moments of forgetfulness in intoxication; the image the man has drawn of the partner of his life soon recedes before the figure of her who is a fellow sufferer with himself; the annoyances with which he is surrounded leave their traces in his family and his home; childhood's innocence seems a fable in such haunts, wedded love a mockery, when poverty and custom assign for its enjoyments receptacles like these.

[After a profile of several particular rookeries] Of other Rookeries we may not speak. We will not pause to describe St. George's-in-the-Borough, with its back courts, where the refuse of Ireland vegetate ; or Kent Street,- the thieves' district,- which years since drew forth the indignation of the topographist; or Pearl Row, St. George's Road, Southwark; or Red House, Old Gravel Lane, Borough; or a lodging house for thieves at the back of Holborn, where 100 thieves are to be seen, at eleven o'clock at night, on an average, six sometimes in one bed ; or the lower part of Bell Street, Paddington, for the lower class of thieves, such as costermongers, &c.; or the courts and alleys leading out of Tooley Street, City, all the courts inhabited by Irish thieves, &c.; or Rents Buildings, York Street, Westminster, inhabited by pickpockets and juvenile thieves; or many others which will suggest themselves to the reader.
    Sufficient has been said to set at work those who are willing to labour in the cause, to show what Rookeries are, to stimulate us to remove them.

We must know under what particular evils the working classes suffer because of high rents and wretched dwellings, before we shall have placed Rookeries in their true light,- before men will regard them, as they really are, the pregnant causes of varied ills. We may begin the inquiry by asking under what landlords such traffic exists; someone must be much to blame; men cannot thus be traded with as though they were corn, molasses, indigo, or any other marketable article, without some grievous neglect of duty,- of fair dealing, we had almost said, - in some quarter.
    Some of the most densely-peopled localities in London are owned by men of great property and high rank,- some of the most wretched streets in the metropolis, if you went deep enough to find the real owner, swell the income of an opulent speculator who has bought them as a good investment. In many cases they are the hereditary estates of some country magnate, who maintains upon the proceeds his costly establishment of hounds and horses; some, again, belong to Corporate Bodies, Public Charities; some to Deans and Chapters, [-174-] to endowed Schools - in short, they are owned by various landlords, whose occupations are of every description. Some of them have been in possession of their present owners' family for two or three hundred years ; others have been more recently acquired.
    You ask, - Are these landlords the recipients of the 5s. a-week per room or story, as the case may be? do their stewards superintend the repairs, take the rents, levy distresses, in the name of their masters? In most cases they do not. Originally, the landlords only leased the ground on which the houses were built for a term of years; two hundred years since, great part of the West End of London was in fields; cattle strayed - and it might be said in the words of the poet,-
            "Passimque armenta videri
        Romanoque foro - et lautis mugire Carnis ;"
the owners let out plots of ground for building at so much a foot for ninety-nine years; at the expiration of these leases, the ground and the houses erected on it came into possession of the family, and the descendants of the original owner found themselves enriched.
    In some cases, the property is encumbered with long leases; so that the heir succeeds to an inheritance, with the wholesome control he ought to exercise over his property alienated for half his life. A Middle-man has bought a long lease, the father, or grandfather of the present owner having received a fine as a premium; such binding hand and foot of the landlord's duties as well as his interests, is indeed too common. Men enter upon [-175-] these covenants, because such is the rule which all follow under similar circumstances; which legal advisers recommend, which present necessities render prudent, - much in the same lax and inconsiderate way in which oaths were administered in the last century, without thought or reflection on their terms or obligations. The system of long leases and heavy fines is unjust, fatal to improvement, checking all reform, and giving a charter to the errors of our forefathers; if it could be abolished, Rookeries would decrease. But suppose the landlord to manage his own property; the collection of rents from many of the tenants of these Rookeries would be difficult, tiresome, and from their very number expensive. It would not sound well to hear that some man of influence had distrained upon one of these hewers of wood and drawers of water; the necessary communication between landlord and tenant would be next to impossible,- in short, without tasking the imagination, we can readily suppose some method of obviating these impediments would be invented. And most injurious has that system been, which, to save trouble, litigation, and notoriety, has been put in the stead of the natural relation between the lessor and the lessee, which has broken a bond honourable to the one, invaluable to the other. As things are now, we have a large class of Middle-men even in the mildest form the case admits of; in many instances, the houses are let out, and under-let again and again, so that there are several links between the owner and the occupier - the [-176-] latter perhaps not knowing the name of the former. No one supposes that a middle-man sees any abstract beauty in long rows of dingy houses, or that there is anything peculiarly elevating in the occupation of letting lodgings.

… There is, then, the strong motive of gain in these transactions! The middle-man supposes that he shall be more than indemnified for his trouble by subdividing these tenements into floors, or the floors into single rooms; and if such an occupation be lucrative, competition will increase in the same ratio; there will be several middle-men in the field whenever a Rookery is to be let, the ground landlord will have no difficulty in disposing of his houses. The only questions with him are, who is the highest or the most solvent bidder; this very competition puts money into his pocket. From what source, then must the middle-man, who ultimately obtains the lease, be indemnified for the high price he has paid? He must wring it from the hapless poor who tenant the apartments which he lets out! They are the real victims.

We admit then, I hope, that these Rookeries are a disgrace to our age; that they have sprung up in part from neglect, in part from the tide of fashion setting in another direction; that unless legislation check them, by fixing the number of inmates to a house, according to the number and size of its rooms, such things will always be. Our selfishness may be alarmed by fevers there [-217-]  generated, and thence wafted to wealthier streets; our humanity maybe shocked by this very slight and imperfect sketch, which aimed, not so much at a statistical account of Rookeries, as at a description of their effects, which has been, perhaps, rather an historical essay than a sanitory report.
    All, however, agree in this-the remedy is difficult. Though why should it be thought so? Why not hope better things of our national character - generous in the extreme, kind, sympathising, charitable?- of our land, the hospitable refuge for distressed foreigners; the rich spending much of their incomes in a wise benevolence, the merchant and the noble often vying in generous ardour to surpass one another, in the number of their charities; most men thinking they are bound to do something for the poor, many giving a considerable portion of their income in charitable donations, notwithstanding the many private claims upon them. Would to God they would consider this vast social question! that they would superintend their own property, instead of committing it to needy Middle-men, and leaving to their tender mercies the dearest interests of their poorer brethren: they little know or think how much misery is caused by their neglect and even ignorance, their subservience to bad custom and unhallowed tradition; so that, because the Fathers did wrong, the sons cannot emancipate themselves from the paternal trammels. Therefore working men tell you, in tones of the greatest earnestness, that they had rather have any landlords, than men [-218-] from their own class, whose natures have been changed by a long course of oppression. And what shall we say to those who are the owners of large factories, makers of steam engines, &c., men who employ commonly at one time five or six hundred workmen, some double or even treble that number; if these men were sensible of their duty, would they not form little colonies, in which those employed by them would be decently lodged, with some attempt, too, at innocent relaxation, when the business of the day was done? Is it just or right thus to bring together large bodies of men, merely to wring from them, at a certain price, a certain amount of labour, and then to consign them and their families to Rookeries? Are not the consequences in the prospective fearful, with our teeming population and increased intelligence ? Is it not the grossest selfishness, or the most criminal indifference, thus to treat men as draught horses, or beasts of burden? And shall we be checked by a homily, on the danger of interfering with capital? What is capital to the value of men's bodies and souls? Can they be put in competition by the Legislature? Although, if we spoke to individual avarice, we have little doubt to which side the balance would incline.